TV round-up: Doctor Who, Guerrilla and more

THERE ARE two things I’ve been wondering about Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday).

There are two things I’ve been wondering about Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday)

Firstly, is there a toilet in the Tardis, and secondly, will it ever stop being so stupidly complicated and abstract that it loses viewers? I’m delighted to be able to report that after seeing last night’s season opener, the answers are “yes” and “yes”.

The toilet is, according to the Doctor, “Downstairs, past the macaroon dispenser”, and showrunner and writer Stephen Moffatt has pulled off what many thought was an impossible feat by bringing some much-needed humanity back to the series, a great deal of which comes from new female companion Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie, who has a really lovely chemistry with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. I can’t remember the old sod smiling so much.

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The series opened with The Doctor as a university lecturer, and Bill as a catering assistant whose daily highlights were chatting up student Heather (the fact that Bill is gay was worn very lightly), and attending The Doctor’s lectures in her spare time.

Now Boring Clara had gone off, the Doc was auditioning for another companion. He had Nardole (Matt Lucas, a delight) as a sidekick cum butler, and spotted in Billie a keen young mind too good for double-frying chips. The mentor-pupil relationship developed in a very sweet way and tied in nicely with the sci-fi storyline of Bill’s crush Heather being turned into a watery zombie.

Moffat may be leaving Doctor Who at the end of this series, but it’s almost like he’s rebooted it already, with Bill learning from scratch about The Doctor and his funny ways, and his time machine. “Is it a knock-through?”, she wondered as she entered the Tardis.

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This first episode brought Doctor Who’s humanity back, after a long, chilly spell. “What are any of us looking for? We’re looking for someone who’s looking for us,” said the Doctor about Bill’s crush on Heather, but it obviously applied to the way he felt about his new companion as well. I think viewers will find the new partnership equally loveable, and plotlines more understandable.

At the opposite end of the warm and cuddly scale was Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic, Thursday and NOW TV), the new drama about the Black Power movement in Britain which will make the blood of anyone old enough to remember the Extremely Bad Old Days of 1970’s racism run cold.

Guerilla is the story of Marcus (Babou Ceesay) and Jas (Frieda Pinto), a teacher and a nurse in London, both involved in the black and civil rights movements, who turn to action beyond photocopying pamphlets when a friend is beaten to death by the police during a riot.

I found it hugely uncomfortable to watch in parts, particularly a scene where a mixed race couple are harassed and beaten by the police. What made it worse was the woman was Irish, so one of the beat coppers thought she deserved a punch in the stomach as well as one in the mouth – these were the days of the IRA, don’t forget.

A riot scene, where police are encouraged to beat up black protestors, is simply horrific and unimaginable today, especially in a graphic shot where the beaten-to-death protester was shown with massive head injuries.

The injustice is obvious and terrible, and were it not for a few moral Molotov cocktails thrown in, it would be hard to see how Guerilla could run for six episodes. The hateful policeman working for Special Branch’s unit designed to quell black unrest has a black mistress; Idris Elba’s character, louche artist Kent, has a peaceful, intellectual view on improving black British lives, and tries to stop Marcus and Jas from going too far.

But too late! They spring a black activist from prison, killing someone in the process, providing the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode.

But unlike Line of Duty’s (BBC1, Sunday) total shocker of DS Steve Arnott being flung down five flights of stairs, I’m not sure that Guerrilla’s cliffhanger will make me return; the series’ graphic reminders of real Seventies grot and horrific moral values, however timely, overwhelmed the characters.

PH

Line of Duty (BBC1, Sunday)

Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC1, Tuesday) trades heavily on nostalgia, too, but theirs comes from the endless parade of pop tunes of the Eighties and Nineties that are blasted out on Forever FM or CDs in John’s Mini. John’s no longer taking Kayleigh to work; she’s moved to her sister’s and is taking the bus and train, but the pair’s banter continues via phone.

But, quelle surprise, he ended up picking her up from the station and things continued pretty much as before; him still not getting she fancies him, and with the usual dream scene (Kayleigh’s fantasy of John picking her up in a Monster Truck on the beach to the music of S Club 7).

I wished something would happen; something that didn’t irritate me, anyway. John and Kayleigh were constantly looking at their mobile phones, often when he was driving – does the law mean nothing to these people? Elbow frontman Guy Garvey popped up in a cameo as Kayleigh’s sister’s partner, Steve - does Kay always have to find a place for his celebrity pals in everything he does? And, could you please do something that makes me actually laugh?

Car Share suffered in comparison to Our Friend Victoria, as it went out right before the first of six tribute programmes to Victoria Wood on the same channel. But whilst it was lovely to see sketches from 30 years ago, to see so many classics in a truncated form was a waste.

You need to see all the mockumentary about a teenager trying to swim the channel to realise how dark it actually is, or all of the “two soups” sketch to understand Julie Walter’s comic physical brilliance as the elderly waitress.

The editing of sketches was done in order to provide comments from friends and colleagues about how wonderful and brilliant Victoria was. We know that – so as well as the love-in, repeats of Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV, Pat and Margaret, Dinnerladies and That Day We Sang are in order so that we might see Wood’s talent in its full, funny, magnificence.